The Other Ocean by Connor Fisher

April 2021

Repurposing leaves in a houseful of summer and the cardinal flaps.

The poem’s setting: moving through the Piedmont, shaking off American dust.

*

Tiny symptoms stutter into teething peaches.

My mouth works wetly on her shoulder; swallows and static.

The face fiddles away from chronology.

My hollow tongue dips left. Two fingers laid over my eyes.

Her movement begins to unravel. Decomposed sounds burble out.

*

Cigarettes placed on a shelf achieve novel sensations of being seen.

An image of an abdomen projected onto bedsheets, clothes, romance novels.

Standing puddles of water matter to the ephemeral reflection and ripple.

A thimble slips, alloys flail against my cupped palm.

*

I drift over your sternum with an apparatus of shivers, flapping.

There’s one towel between us shaking the dust off our bodies, the floor.

We visit the other ocean with honesty, a little bird, a blindfold.

*

In the dream my ceilings vaulted, my other honesty turned like a glove.

Fields after fields bring flickering bats along a dislocated arc, a dusky amber.

If I thought to destroy a landscape I would close one eye over wet grass.

Parts of life become a narrative like entomology.

Her fingers in the foxglove describe small industries of capital.

Look close: arranged figurine composites: almost gnomes on the hill

Her every eye on a yellow jacket swells up as a symptom of love.

It’s 5 o’clock; north Georgia siroccos leech away dogwood blooms, anthills.

*

An object, its limits and the limits you perceive compared to a bird call.

Red cardinal charters an honest memory but elevated in pitch, tone.

A wasp flaunts atmospheres above the sense of summer.

*

No point of origin for the Arctic Tern, just musk, distended surfaces.

The mouth of this bottle brushes across fingertips strung out like a mime.

The myth of this body expands into minutiae, into skin’s creases.

*

Just outside the window, a pinecone folds into itself. The size of my heart.

Inner valves crease in wonder through the storm and squall.

Cloudscape, that vernal wonder, that staircase, tightrope topped by two jays.